


Day of the Dead (Grief part II)

by pearky



Series: Short fics [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Cemetery, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Psychological Trauma, Short One Shot, not slash ew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-11-02 06:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20654075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearky/pseuds/pearky
Summary: "He would deserve to be here.”This time, he receives a soft hum of acknowledgement, maybe even approval. It’s hard to tell.Sasuke and Kakashi run into each other at the memorial stone.





	Day of the Dead (Grief part II)

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday sensei i wrote something sad just for you. kakasasus dont touch this

Cigarette smoke fills his nose. He watches the cloud dilute into the faded pink-purple of the sky, into the grey of the fog; It’s cold, the chill is biting at his fingertips and his nose, the ground is frozen under his footsteps, the shiver that passes through him shakes his whole body. The faint sound of what he knows are deer antlers knocking together sounds from the nearby forest, another proof of how quiet he had been.

The figure in front of him discards the remainder of the cigarette. He sees it burn with a brilliant orange-red for a sole moment before it’s stepped on, extinguished. It’s left crumpled up on the frozen ground, forgotten. For a second, he feels bad for the animal that will come along to eat it, desperate for food in the early November cold. Then he remembers that feeling sorry won’t save anything. He _knows_.

He’s sure he hadn’t been noticed, especially when he sees the sharply angled silhouette drop to its knees in front of the dark stone, into long shadow it cast in the early morning. The sound this makes causes his own joints to hurt.

He is about to leave then, certain that the man wants privacy, convinced he will manage to slip by undetected. He turns on his heel, silent as ever.

“You can stay,” Kakashi’s voice cuts into the silence, a voice that makes his heart hurt. It’s the same one he’d heard a thousand times before, in situations so different from each other, from joking around, upbeat, through trying to convince him to stop straying from the path he believed to be predefined to him, to threatening to take his life.

And now, broken, disinterested, kneeling on the frozen ground of the cemetery.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” He returns. The words echo between them. He takes a step forward, then another, until he can drop to his knees next to the other man and place a light red carnation at the foot of the stone, next to the few dozen other flowers that had already been placed there. It blends in with the roses and the lilies.

He thinks that they’ll keep this silence, let the early hours of morning slip away in such a peaceful manner, but then the man next to him speaks up and disturbs the deer and the woodpecker in a tree nearby. “Do you have anyone important on here?” He asks, as if this were casual small talk and not their dead loved ones they were talking about. He doesn’t have it in him this morning to be rude and leave him without a reply.

“No,” He answers honestly. He expects a surprised response, instead, he is greeted by silence again. He elaborates nevertheless, in a way he’s sure will be understood, “But he would deserve to be here.”

This time, he receives a soft hum of acknowledgement, maybe even approval. It’s hard to tell.

The silence that he’d wanted has fallen over them again. The woodpecker’s rhythmic banging has returned. The deer seem to be gone. The sky is changing from pink to a full orange, beams of light shine through between the barren tree trunks of the forest. There’s no one here yet other than the two of them, both looking down at the dead grass beneath their knees. They pay a minute of silence to the stone together.

“How long has it been?” Kakashi is the one to eventually break the silence again. When he glances over and their eyes connect, he can see that his gaze is clouded, a sight he doesn’t think he’s seen before. There are two black irises staring back at him, silver hair falling across them in an unkempt, messy manner. He misses the red, he realises. He used to be so angry, livid, that this stranger could possess something that clearly didn’t belong to him, but now that it was gone, he wishes, every single time that he meets the man, that he could see that red eye on someone else other than himself again.

“Five years.” He tears his gaze away to instead turn it to the tall stone towering over the both of them, casting them in darkness. The fog is clearing, the air grows yet warmer, his cape now suffices in keeping the cold away. He realises he misses the bite of the chill. “He would be twenty-six.”

Another undecipherable hum. He decides to let it go.

He wants to ask why Kakashi is here, who he’s mourning. _Everyone’s already been killed _\- He can still remember the ring of those words, even after almost ten years, even with so many of his memories gone, buried under two decades of trauma. But this, he never forgot this.

He doesn’t ask.

Kakashi pushes himself up with considerable difficulty, as if his body is protesting the departure. Once he steps out of the shadow, his figure is illuminated from the back by the early morning glow, his face left dark as he turns back to stare at him. In this position, with him still kneeling in front of the stone, and Kakashi towering over him, he feels like a small child again – both wishing to be mentored, taken under someone’s wing, and despising Kakashi for trying to stop him.

Maybe he should have let himself be stopped.

He’s crushed by regret, for the millionth time this morning. It weighs heavy on him like a blanket. He forces himself to ignore the images of sputtering blood, of fingers near his face, of dark caves that creep in his head.

“You smoke, Sasuke?” Kakashi’s voice pulls him out of his memories. The silver-haired man grabs the bucket he’d brought along in one hand, the other offers him an open pack of cigarettes. He reaches out with a single shaking hand and takes one. The ‘thank you’ slides out of his mouth like a reflex before he sets the stick between his lips. He stands on his feet and Kakashi lights it before his own. The smoke fills his lungs. He watches the cloud dissolve.

“I see you still have flowers.” Kakashi’s hair bounces as he nods toward the small basket he’d brought along, a dozen white carnations dangling out of it. “I’m going to the cemetery, too, if you mind to join me.”

He considers it for a few seconds. As he stares at Kakashi, he realises that he can look directly into his eyes without having to turn his gaze upwards.

He misses being a child, he realises. He misses having a purpose. He misses his brother. He misses being small. He misses his mother’s eyes. He misses Kakashi. He misses crying at the cemetery. He misses having a _purpose_.

“I’d rather be alone now. I’ll stay here for a while,” He replies. He thinks about the times Kakashi was late, how he found out the reason only years later, and thinks, yes, this is where he had been, what he had been doing, and he could understand that he stayed here for hours on end even when he had things to get done. So much has been left unsaid between them that he had to piece together on his own. There’s still so much that he wishes, deep down, that they could share, that Kakashi could teach him. So much that he’d taught him that he didn’t even know about.

“Thank you… for the cigarette.”

“See you around, Sasuke.” Kakashi flashes a smile, signalled only by the creasing of his eyes. He watches the clouds of smoke he leaves behind as he goes, grey like his hair, like the fog, like the biting cold.

**Author's Note:**

> i just like writing angst. i really do. i hope you liked this piece of angst as much as i liked writing it. leave a comment if you did or something. im off to eat packet ramen.


End file.
